“The pandemic is a portal,” wrote Arundhati Roy in April of 2020:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
Some of us are emerging from COVID life. Although, with people in the US refusing vaccines, people in poorer countries not having access to vaccines, and delta variants, the picture is complicated. Still, in the past year, many of us have pontificated how, despite lockdowns and some people getting sick and others dying, there have been some silver linings. Working from home can be nice. We haven’t had to commute, and therefore we are saving money on gas. We can have lunch with our kids or walk our dogs during the work day. Getting groceries and other items delivered to our doors very much beats the hassle of going to the store. With zoom, we can even work from a mountain or ocean Airbnb. We have cut down on lunch take-out spending and maybe have eaten healthier meals. It has given us more time in parks and green spaces, especially as we couldn’t be inside with people not in our bubbles. At least for some professions, where hands-on in-person work isn’t always necessary, maybe we can apply some of these lessons for the post-COVID world. Maybe we can work from home part-time, at least. Tech saved us this past year, and after the initial hiccups, tech gave us a lot of flexibility. Maybe tech can save or help us in the years to come. That is, maybe we can work this way and do these things but this time without having to worry about quarantine periods or virtual/home-schooling (presuming the kids are back in school).
There is good will and some insight in these sentiments. On the aggregate, we Americans spend way too much time working, driving to and from, and otherwise away from family, friends, and recreation. Americans in particular are not a very happy people. Maybe new flexible work habits can lead to more happiness. However, who will be able to enjoy such a post-COVID working lifestyle? And, who will have to continue to grind in person to support that lifestyle? Who are the workers--from mega-farms to mega-warehouses, intentionally out of our view--that will enable our work from home and our relatively handsome income/wealth intake? While I found virtual teaching to be trying and less than ideal, I was grateful that I could work from home and remain relatively safe. There were some benefits, in addition to not commuting. On my off-period from teaching, where in person I would have had 250 sixth-graders with cafeteria duty, I got to spend time with my (one) daughter. But, what about the custodians, the secretarial staff, the food service staff, or the security guards? They could not work from home. They all had to go in, at least part of the time. In some school districts and in other non-education professions, many of those workers--"support staff”--lost their jobs. Ours did not, in part because they are unionized.
This is where Andrew Yang, Thomas Friedman, and Silicon Valley tech utopians come in with their promise of social entrepreneurship, universal basic income, and fully automated/liberated lifestyles. We need not worry about people left behind, we are told. They will be retrained, redeployed, and eventually set up into their UBI nest-egg. Trust the process. But in the meantime, maybe learn how to code, just in case. Become innovators yourselves. A little more STEM ed, just a little more loosening of capital, and we’re almost there, at the Lexus and the olive tree, and all will be carbon neutral, by the way.
But, these confidence-men and their punditry obscure the age-old questions--and injustices--of power, ownership, capital, and labor. Without any fundamental or radical restructuring, this “new world” we imagine will be a lot like the old one but with even greater inequalities. The utopia they imagine for themselves will mean further dystopia for the masses. Who owns the algorithms owns the world. If we knew the history and political economy of technology, capitalism, and globalization, we would understand that “tech [by itself] won’t save us." And recall, the problem isn’t technology per se. Or, as ludicrous as the billionaire space race is, the problem isn’t space exploration. The problem is the power differential. The problem is inequality, extraction, exploitation, and the disposability of human beings and natural resources. Jeff Bezos was cruel yet honest when he said, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.” The press mostly lapped it up. Good liberals were too shocked and awed, too mesmerized by the space wizards to ask any probing questions. Even though we will never go, Bezos, etc., want us to be distracted with dreams of space as they meanwhile wreck human beings and our actual home planet on their path to space.
As we imagine the post-COVID world, Arundhati Roy cautions us, sharply:
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality….
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
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“Want to get Trump re-elected?”
Who will determine how we fight for another world?
On the domestic front, Thomas Friedman and company are offering their well-paid, unsolicited advice. They are setting the scope of our debate, as they gear up for the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential pre-debate countdown shows already. Skirting over statistics and substantive arguments, Friedman tells us that attempting to defund the police, for instance, will cost Democrats the House, the Senate, and eventually the White House. One can see him “paging Michael Bloomberg” again, already. Hamilton Nolan however, in In These Times, replies to Friedman et al.:
This utterly pedestrian idea — that armed police officers are not the optimal enforcement method for everything from traffic stops to school safety to mental health crises, and that some of what we spend on police could be shifted into programs that better address those areas, in order to produce better results for the public — is the essence of the call to “defund the police.” It is about the sort of measured shift in funding priorities that governments at all levels do every single year. No matter where anyone stands on the merit of defunding the police, the nature of it is a thoroughly common sense debate over the wisest allocation of public resources. When crime rates have plummeted for decades and we face a national crisis of millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by being imprisoned, all while social services remain inadequate to meet demand even as police funding has steadily risen, any honest technocrat can see that reallocating money from police to other areas should be an obvious move….
The quality of the debate we are having on this issue is absolute trash. This is not really because of Fox News and Republicans, who can be expected to mischaracterize the entire thing and turn it into a wild smear, but instead because of the mainstream political media, which has completely acquiesced to using a crude caricature of “defund the police” as its go-to version. This happens because the political media exists not to cover the substance of issues, but to cover politics as sports. At its core, our mass media is able only to talk about which side is winning in the political arena. The actual wisdom of policy choices is considered a second-order question that is not the business of the media to answer. The smear version of the real issue, therefore, has more utility to the political media than the more honest version, because the smear version is what is being wielded in the political fight.
One year after the biggest protest movement in American history demanded police reform, we now find ourselves in the ludicrous position of being told by all of the shallowest professional political savants that defunding the police is a toxic position that is poison to Democrats. From Axios to Thomas Friedman, almost the entire centrist pundit class has coalesced around the analysis that because crime rates rose during the pandemic year, defunding the police is a bad idea, electorally speaking. Do they attempt to engage with the fact that crime rates rose in cities across the nation that have not actually defunded the police? No. Do they attempt to engage with the question of whether cities’ enormous spending on police relative to other civic priorities is justified by the results? No. Those are policy choices with profound consequences on human lives, and would probably require a lot of research, and are therefore not something that Tom Friedman or Axios would ever bother with. The pundit all-stars are interested only in the question of whether the misleading, kindergarten-level connection between the mere words “defund the police” and the fearmongering crime propaganda being featured constantly on Fox News will translate into a political liability for Democrats. By focusing exclusively on this frame, they facilitate it becoming a reality.
The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder--and which to some extent contributed to November Democrat electoral surges in places like Philadelphia, Georgia, Detroit, and Milwaukee--had one major material demand, aside from the firing and trying of Derek Chauvin: defund the police and use that money to refund other community needs. Removing statues, while not unimportant, is relatively easy, compared to desegregating schools and equalizing school funding. Renaming streets and neighborhoods is also not unimportant, but it’s relatively easy too, compared to desegregating housing and fixing the racial-capitalist incentives that segregate housing in the first place. It’s easier to rename Boston’s Dudley Square--named after Thomas Dudley, the Massachusetts governor in the 1600s who legalized slavery-- to “Nubian Square” than to tackle the racialized gentrifying trends in that neighborhood. It’s relatively easy for corporations to make their BLM hashtags and conduct diversity sessions with employees, compared to raising wages or allowing unionization, especially in sectors where workers are disproportionately of color. On the defund/refund question, BLM activists, other black leaders, civil rights groups, and community organizations do not all agree. There are disagreements on principle and of degree. True, “defund the police” is not politically popular in especially Fox/Republican circles, where it is predictably smeared and caricatured. And yes, the policy discussion has many levels and more nuance that is not captured by that three-word phrase coming off the streets. However, as Nolan wrote above, “It is a thoroughly common sense debate over the wisest allocation of public resources.” (Analogously, greatly defunding the Pentagon/military in order to fund health care and other human needs is a thoroughly common sense debate, too. The image of the multibillion dollar USS Theodore Roosevelt trying to come into port last spring because some of its sailors had contracted COVID, one of whom died, let alone the 600,000 people who died across the nation, highlights for me the absurdity of placing “national security” above every other concern. What about human security?) But, it appears that the Tom Friedmans of the world--i.e. the people who said it was “racism” that gave us Trump, a racism that is somehow not connected to class or capital or other structures--in the end don’t want us to do anything about that racism, other than say, “Those people (not us in our segregated neighborhoods and schools) need to be educated.” In his “Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police” column, Friedman references the city council in his hometown of Minneapolis defunding the police and the resultant crime upticks. For the record however, Minneapolis hasn’t defunded the police yet, although local BLM groups are still leading the fight.
The bad faith Tucker Carlsons out there are paid handsomely to stoke outrage. They are beyond the pale. We must find a way to make Fox less profitable and therefore less influential. There is a special place in hell for Rupert Murdoch, especially as he doesn’t believe much of what is disseminated by his media empire but just knows that it makes money. For some reason though, we think we should still listen to the Thomas Friedmans and Maureen Dowds out there, who want us to be, like them, distracted by the latest microchip or celebrity, until the situation--any situation--goes back to normal--a normal that costs them nothing and in which nothing has fundamentally changed. Chomsky:
I don’t bother writing about Fox News. It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, “Look how courageous I am.” But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.
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"Webbed off walls? Walled off webs?"
After Trump’s election in 2016, in my less angry and more grandiose moments, I felt that I needed to listen to Trump voters, to understand where they were coming from, to feel their pain, and to maybe convince them that voting for Trump was/is not a good idea. To understand “Trump country,” I read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and parts of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. But then, I would come across Trump’s actual voice at a press conference or a Trump supporter’s comment on Facebook, and those grand ideas would quickly evaporate: I can’t... F--- him, F--- them...why would I...why should I? After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, these feelings hardened in our liberal circles, not without good reason. Jamie Davis Smith wrote, "No, I will not be 'reaching out' to Trump voters.":
Before any attempt at “unity” can be made, there needs to be a reckoning, an acknowledgment that so many of Trump’s actions have been unconscionable and do not align with societal ideals that claim to value all life. Building bridges with people who share Trump’s views sends a clear message that you are willing to keep the peace at the expense of the dignity and well-being of those with less power and privilege.
Rebecca Solnit wrote on the importance of “not meeting Nazis halfway.” I myself am not interested in any false unity. I do think those who voted for Trump need to have a reckoning. I don’t think we should meet Nazis halfway either, where the Nazis exist (which is not everywhere, for the record). These feelings have, of course, hardened even more after January 6.
Trump, Trumpism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, the politics of spectacle, the dangerous conspiracies, kleptocracy, and fascism must be defeated. At the same time, however, I think we good liberals need to have a reckoning ourselves. I have attempted to scratch that surface in the preceding pages. To what degree have we contributed to the social rot, and how can we radically transform our society into something more just?
Our path forward will include voting. It will require electoral work. It will require fighting for voting rights. It will include legislating and lobbying. It will require advocacy, activism, and civil disobedience. It will involve reporting, podcasting, and broadcasting. It will for the time being, unfortunately, mean contesting ideas on Twitter and on the talk shows. It will necessitate political and history education—and science education, too. And, it will require talking to Trump supporters.
Yes, I know. But, it doesn’t have to be about Trump. We need not mention his name at all. We do not have to have a beer (summit) or a CNN town hall with them where we gingerly “agree to disagree” at the end and pat ourselves on the back for having “civil discourse.” Instead, our work should be around the material, the immediate, the local: health care, air quality, snow removal, rent, child care, or utilities, for instance; or working conditions, hours, and pay. Iraq war vet and community organizer Vincent Emanuele provides some grounded perspective:
Anyone who is actively organizing is likely already speaking and working with Trump supporters…. For instance, let’s say you’re organizing a tenant’s union, which might include a rent strike. Depending on where you live, there’s a very good chance that you will encounter people who voted for Donald Trump.
Of course, you can choose not to work with them, but in some parts of the U.S., that means not working with 40–60% of the population. In other parts of the country, where support for Trump is very strong, you’d be ignoring anywhere from 60–80% of the population.
Organizers understand that you can’t win big campaigns, big reforms, with only 20–40% support, no matter the context, which means if you’re serious about winning campaigns that will make a material difference in peoples’ lives, perhaps our only chance at bringing some of Trump’s supporters to our side, you’ll work with them. No one is arguing that it’s easy, but it must be done (if we’re interested in winning).
If what you’re saying is the left shouldn’t spend any time in the towns, counties, regions, and states that Trump overwhelmingly won, how do you expect to structurally change the political system in this country? Are you arguing that chaotic street protests will do the trick? Are you arguing that a violent insurrection is on the horizon, or ideal? Be clear about what you’re saying because hiding behind vague statements about resistance or revolution isn’t helpful, especially right now….
If you don’t plan on organizing Trump supporters in the context of a housing-rights campaign, what about workplace organizing? What’s more important, your coworkers’ cultural habits and offensive language, or your shared economic interests? Hey, so-called woke Marxists (or anarchists), I’m talking to you.
If you think you’re gonna successfully conduct a workplace organizing campaign without speaking to people who voted for Trump, without speaking to people who might say sexist or racist things, you’re lacking experience, living in a social bubble, or completely unserious.
And to that space between the liberals and the leftists, Emanuele gives another good kick in the rear:
If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Well, I live in Chicago/New York/Los Angeles/Detroit/Atlanta, so I don’t have to think about this” guess again: your MSNBC-watching, Obama-loving neighbors, coworkers, and family members aren’t necessarily budding revolutionaries. Are we not organizing them either? If not, who, exactly, are we organizing? Only the people who agree with us? That’s activism, not organizing.
Writing “In Defense of Politics” for Boston Review , Michael Gecan shares stories of community groups coming together across the political spectrum to talk about—and win—broadband access in rural Ohio or criminal justice reform in urban/suburban New Jersey. They did not talk about Trump.
None of this is to say that the local should supplant the national. It can’t, especially with the national purse strings or, for one, the national warmaking. But, the shinier, sexier national scene has far too long supplanted the local. Also, none of this is to say that we don’t have to talk about Trump. We do. As Wallace Shawn wrote, collectively, we are the face of Donald Trump as much as we are the prettier faces of Kennedy and Obama. But, Trump need not dominate our discourse. We cannot let him get in the way of the deeper politics required.
Daniel Denvir is the host of the very academic and yet very accessible and engaging podcast The Dig, which introduced me to a lot of the scholars and practitioners I have referenced. He also is a socialist organizer. In a very good conversation about the so-called “cancel culture,” Denvir concluded:
One way to think about it perhaps is that some things about the discourse on Twitter are bad. It's certainly not the existential threat that either centrist liberals or so many figures now on the right frame it as.... But people on the left certainly shouldn't confuse dunking or hating on their enemies on Twitter with actually meaningful substantive politics. And I'm not saying all politics is canvassing, but canvassing is always an amazing gut check and reality check 'cause what you're doing on the doors when you're interacting with median American voters or neighbors or whoever you're talking to, why ever you're talking to them, they are typically coming from a place that is rather different from you. They typically have some, often have, some views that you might find offensive, and your goal is the exact opposite of what is incentivized by the discourse on Twitter. It is not to own them. It is to meet them where they're at, not because where they're at is good but precisely because you want to bring them from where they're at closer to where you are at. And that is politics.
The path forward will take courage, faith, hope, love. It must “turn on affection.” It will require humility, as none of us can be certain what it will look like, as we should be skeptical of anyone who claims to have all the answers, and as Wendell Berry’s mad farmer admits, “It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.”
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The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Owning up to Iraq, not doing that again, not trusting the intel, bringing the troops home, ending the Afghanistan war, owning up to the 2008 crash, reversing financialization, regulating instead of deregulating, bringing Wall Street and Silicon Valley to heel, empowering workers, taxing the rich, making health care universal, desegregating schools and neighborhoods, defunding the police and refunding community needs, moving to renewables, creating green jobs. None of this inoculates us against a Trump return, or a smarter demagogue’s rise, or a January 6-type event of greater scale and violence. “It could happen here.” “It,” though, is not inevitable. Nothing is. We should empower workers, tax the rich, keep the faith, etc., or die trying because those are the right things to do. Filibusters, Republicans, Senate representation, gerrymandering, voter suppression, reactionary Supreme Courts, campaigns awash with cash, Fox and friends all stand in the way, yes, absolutely. But, how are we good liberals standing in the way, too? We must relentlessly hold all power to account.
British Labour MP Tony Benn’s words are very sobering and yet appropriately encouraging: “There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So, toughen up, bloody toughen up.”
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